Mobile Interaction touching Augmented Reality and Context Awareness

A Research Topic of the Distributed Systems Group

A large part of the information needs in everyday settings is directly related
to real-world entities, like objects, places, and people. Attaching
information to those entities thus has many benefits for the quality of
interaction between humans and their environment. For example, an object could
provide users with its own object-history, which could be used to infer object
relationships and interaction contexts in which the physical artifact has taken
part. By connecting physical artifacts to information in the virtual world,
such "physical hyperlinks" can serve as visible entry points into the
information infrastructure, thus increasing accessibility and visibility of a
virtual environment from within the physical world.

Narrowing the gap between the physical world surrounding the user and the
virtual world requires a kind of "bridge" between entities in the
real world and the associated information in the virtual world. Interaction
with the virtual aspects of an entity requires a device which is able to detect
the entity and display related information. Such a "symbolic magnifying
glass" allows, for example, to make object relations visible, to access
virtual functions of an object, and to virtually zoom into and out of an object
in order to get to know the object details or the object's context,
respectively. Physical objects thus become "interactive" in a way
which formerly was only possible with purely virtual, computer-based objects.